The crown of sciences: Can it be just a science? The journey of political science in the 20th century

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1 African Journal of Political Science and International Relations Vol. 3 (11), pp , November, 2009 Available online at ISSN Academic Journals Review Paper The crown of sciences: Can it be just a science? The journey of political science in the 20th century Nasr M. Arif Professor of Political Sciences, Cairo University, Egypt. Nasr.Arif@zu.ac.ae. Accepted 22 September, 2009 Throughout history there was an agreement that the position of Political Science is at the peak of the hierarchy of social and human disciplines. In Aristotle s view, politics touches on all aspects of public life that the rulers should deal with. Therefore, Political Science, by nature, is different from all other fields of knowledge. The history of its development in the twentieth century is a manifestation of this thesis, or indeed a realistic embodiment of it. Starting from the second half of the nineteenth century until the 1970s, Political Science has sought to become just a science, like other social and sometimes natural sciences. This study, however, seeks to develop a distinct approach for studying the evolution of Political Science in the twentieth century by employing three approaches: history of science, sociology of science, and epistemology of science. These approaches will be spun together to enhance our understanding of the emergence and development of Political Science, which can safely be divided into these three stages: the independence stage, the behaviorist stage, and the stage of revision, criticism and 'post-isms'. Key words: American political science, behaviorism, empiricism, European political science, evolution of political discipline, history of political science, paradigm shifts, political science, post-behaviorism, postmodernism. INTRODUCTION As a disciple, Political Science is only an epistemological reflection on the nature of the political phenomenon. The latter determines the former, not vise versa. Understandably, Political Science would be expected to be as complex and intermingling as the political phenomenon itself. In essence, the political phenomenon is a hyper phenomenon located on top of the social hierarchy. This higher location is not due to exaltation, but it is a location determined by its nature and entity as a phenomenon dealing with issues of human social institution in its different forms, phases and identities. What may be considered as the subject of a separate discipline is part of the field of political science. The social, psychological, educational, sanitary, economic phenomena are parts of the subject of political science, and are components of the same political phenomenon seen from a specific angle. Political science is not a separate discipline, but mixture of many other disciplines and the political phenomenon is dependent on other social phenomena. What is crucial in this context, however, is the fact that political science is of a distinct nature that differs from the other social, natural and human sciences. Various political traditions have stated that political science is the peak of the hierarchy of disciplines. In Aristotle s view, politics touches on all aspects of public life that rulers should deal with, regardless of their significance. He also emphasized that other disciplines deal with knowledge in a definite way, while political science determines which knowledge is to be studied by the state, and which one is to be learned by each social class, and to what extent it should be learned. To Ricci (1984:213), Aristotle's definition of politics means that he viewed political science as the 'roof of the academic temple', and other disciplines as 'columns' to this 'roof'. In other words, it is the 'master science'. This understanding came down from Aristotle to Woodrow Wilson who stated that: "Nothing which forms or affects human life seems to me to be properly foreign to the student of politics". In the Islamic tradition, political science was also recognized as the 'crown of sciences'. Therefore, political science, by nature, is not like any other field of knowledge. The history of its development in the twentieth century is a manifestation of this thesis and in fact a realistic embodiment of it. From the second half of the nineteenth century

2 478 Afri. J. Pol. Sci. Int. Relat. until the 1970s, political science has sought to become an independent discipline just like other social and sometimes natural sciences. Nonetheless, the question is still hanging: Has political science become a discipline in its own right? Could it be independent from other social sciences? Has it achieved the objectives of the pioneers of its contemporary perspectives? Or has the circle been completed and political science, after a century of struggle, is back to the first question? This study seeks to investigate the development of Political Science in more than a century, that is, since the time this discipline was projected to be independent from other social sciences. It adopts a methodological framework that combines and employs three approaches: history of knowledge, sociology of knowledge and epistemology of knowledge. By relying on history of knowledge we intend to discern the possible phases through which Political Science has proceeded. But these phases in themselves will not be adequately understood unless we examine the interaction between Political Science and a specific society within which it has emerged and developed. And, thus, we resort to the second approach; namely, the sociology of knowledge. It is here that we come to know how the dominant forces in society set the political and scientific priorities and determine what issues have to be brought to the forefront, researched and funded, and what issues should be ignored. But that is not all. As the development of an academic field can be affected by internal social and political forces, it can also be affected by external ones. Consequently, it will only be natural to look into the internal political/academic interactions in various countries as well as into the extraterritorial influences. To deepen our understanding of this phenomenon a little bit farther we have also to probe into the area of epistemology of knowledge. We will be interested in the intellectual processes of paradigm shifts, drastic changes of perspectives, and abandonment of old frameworks that once constituted the field of study. Due to the distinctive nature of political science, its development in the twentieth century necessitates to start with a number of preliminary points that should be carefully examined for a better analysis. 1. Most of the political science historians (Easton et al., 1995:1-3) firmly believe that this field of study can develop only within a democratic political system. To Huntington, wherever democracy is firmly established, political science becomes strong, and vise versa (Mckay, 1991:469). To Newton, political science, probably more than any other discipline, can only develop in an atmosphere of freedom and democracy, since it is a threat to non-democratic systems whose reaction to a serious political research may sometimes go as far as suppressing or at least marginalizing it. This may sometimes even be the reaction of democratic states themselves, especially at times of crisis (Newton and Valles, 1991: ). Since there are various patterns of democracy, there are also various patterns of political science. In the United States, for instance, political science developed under the liberal, democratic values and systems. In Europe, however, there are more complex patterns of democracy, including liberalism, Corporatism, elitism, populism, socialism and satatism (Mckay, 1991:464). In his book "A History of Political Thought, published in 1937, Sabine has established this theoretical hypothesis, asserting that political science is part of politics, and that the development of its history has nothing to do with truth, virtue or ethics (Saxonhouse, 1983:5). 2. Contemporary political science is to a great extent synonymous with American political science. The texture of society and the state in the USA has given a chance to the emergence of an academic community capable of reconstituting the political science in the world, so much so that, after the second world war, it was considered as an 'imperial discipline' in its implications across national borders and in determining the field of study outside the USA. At the same time, it is closed and totally indulged in US interests, ignoring, and sometimes changing, the political discourses coming from any other part of the world. In rare cases, these discourses are taken seriously (Farr, et al, 1995: vii). In all cases, the American political science is an inseparable part of the American political history, and all claims concerning 'value neutrality' and 'immunity against ideologization and objectivism are nothing but wishful thinking or ideological cover-up (Ball 1993: 42-43). 3. The history of contemporary political science is the history of its departments, colleges, professional associations and financing institutions, and not a history of individual thoughts raised by philosophers as it was the case prior to the second half of the nineteenth century. 4. In a study published in 1925, Charles Marriam (Merriam, 1925:49) analyzed the development of political science according to the development of its method, which he divided as follows: The preliminary deductive method up to 1850, the historical comparative method from ; observation, sociological surveys and sociometry from , and the beginnings of the psychological treatment of politics, 1925 and after. Easton also has introduced a division that is based on the prevailing perspectives in each stage. To him, poli-tical science has passed through four stages: (Easton, 1991: 275) Formal legalism, traditionalism (non-formalist and pre-behaviorist), behaviorism, and post-behaviorism. Finally, there are three stages in Michael Stein's opinion: (Stein, 1991:170) The stage of acquiring legitimacy, in which the field sought to found independent institutions for itself, , the stage of full foundation in which the objectives of the previous stages were achieved, and the stage of the adoption of realistic attitudes in political scholarship, in which efforts shifted to direct concentration on public politics and empirical studies. In this study, however, I argue that political science developed through the following stages: First, the stage of independence of political science from other disciplines, like history, philosophy, economics and law, and the establishment of an academic field of study or an inde-

3 Arif 479 pendent discipline in the institutional and academic sense. Second, the stage of the shift of political scholarship to a science in the sense determined by logical positivism, and the attempt to make it closer to the more developed social sciences, like psychology, or the natural sciences in their methodological accuracy. Third, the stage of revision, criticism and 'post-isms', like postbehaviorism, post-positivism, post-functionalism, postmodernism, and the field's return to its old link to other social sciences or still back to its old position as the 'crown of sciences' and 'roof of the academic temple'. In each of these stages, political science will be discussed from the three historical, sociological and epistemological viewpoints, and we will conclude our analysis with a definition of the ontological structure of the discipline at each stage by defining its theoretical substance. FIRST: THE STAGE OF INDEPENDENCE FROM OTHER SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES At this stage political science witnessed the beginning of its independence as an academic field with a distinctive institutional structure. This can be considered as a turning point in the history of political scholarship ever since its earliest beginnings among the Greeks. It was the first attempt to move politics away from one academic field to another, from one analytic method to another, and from one epistemological setting to another. This juncture in the history of political science was characterized by a number of determinants and features without the understanding of which it becomes hard to realize the later developments of political science. The most important of these factors are as follows: a.) This stage cannot be put into specific temporal confines. It cannot be defined in a clear historical beginning and end. In some cases as the USA, it started in the second half of the nineteenth century, and in other countries like Sweden, in the first half of the seventeenth century, and in a third category like the third world countries, as recently as the 1970s. So, there is at least a century of development during which political science became an independent field of study. One may even claim that some societies in the Third World are moving to the 21 st century without entering this stage. Therefore, no attempt will be made here to give a temporal definition of this stage. b.) Although the historical examination of the institutional and academic structure of political science focuses on a wide variety of countries, the epistemological and ontological analysis will mainly concentrate on the American political science, which is the model followed in one way or another by the whole world. c.) The relation of the American political science with both the German and British political sciences is a dialectical one that needs to be discussed in a separate project. The German and British educational traditions and intellectual movement that prevailed in the second half of the 19th century set the rules, motives and bases on which the American political science was erected. Nevertheless, the American apprentice soon excelled its German and British masters. The German and British educational capabilities could not even catch up with the American political science until the second half of the 20 th century. d.) The formation of the chairs of political science in Sweden, Finland and Holland in the first half of the 17th century did not mean much to the development of the field in Europe while in the American experience this was a major development. e.) There are various tracks of the development of political science in the countries in question. There is a model of early foundation of university chairs of political science, then a stage of stagnancy, then an adoption of a foreign alternative as we see in the case of Scandinavian political science. Also there is the model of a strong, theoretically established beginning followed by a complete breakdown which was then followed by resurgence on the basis of other academic traditions, like the case of Germany. In this paper, the process of the development of political science will be discussed in three stages: The institutional structure of political science at the stage of independence Here the focus is mainly on the study and analysis of a number of indications that have been considered as a measure of independence of political science. These indications are: a.) Developing university courses on political science and its major subjects; b.) founding of chairs for political science; c.) establishment of the departments of political science in colleges and universities; d.) emergence of professional associations for those working in the field of political science, especially professors and scholars; e.) formation of an academic community with a paradigm shared by those who work in the field; f.) publication of academic journals of political science. These are only a reflection, or rather a consequence, of a number of internal and external social and academic interactions such as the social and political environment, academic influences across the borders, management of educational processes, personal and institutional influences, and the impact of financing agencies. Here, by examining the following cases, we will analyze the way political science was established as an independent academic discipline separate from the traditional political scholarship, which was tied to other disciplines and fields of study. The case of Holland Sweden, and Finland: Holland is the first country to teach political sciences as a university major at the University of Leiden in First, it was part of literature and philosophical studies. The first independent professorial chair of political science was established after the World War II. (Daalder, 1991:279) Then came the Swedish experience. The Johan Skytte professorship of discourse and politics was established at the University of Uppsala in However, the profess-

4 480 Afri. J. Pol. Sci. Int. Relat. sors of this field started focusing on the political science only in the 1840s. In Finland the first professorship of the political science emerged in Abo Academy in 1640, and those who occupied this chair were known as 'professors of politics and history. (Anckar, 1991:239) Nonetheless, the political science started to develop only in the beginning of the 20th century when the Scandinavian political science adopted the German tradition and began to concentrate on constitutional law, political history, institutions, philosophy and history of ideas. (Anckar,1991a :188) Then came the shift to the American tradition in the 1960s when the behaviorist paradigm prevailed. (Anckar, 1991: 239) The case of the United States: Universities become widely known in the United States only after the civil war. There were only small colleges established mostly for religious denominations, and their objectives were confined to the graduation of professionals and clergymen. Universities began to emerge only in 1860 when these minor colleges turned into universities (Ricci, 1984:30-36). The political science started with the emergence of universities, and it was not a study field in the minor colleges, although political issues were studied in graduation projects. The first course with a political title was introduced by the University of Pennsylvania in 1841, called 'political law', which was taught at the English Department. The classics of political thought were adopted for analysis as models of literature and eloquence (Ricci, 1984:57). Then, a number of pioneers, each of whom could be considered as an 'institution' in himself, appeared and established academic traditions, raised a generation of researchers, and founded departments of political science. The first of this generation of scholars was Francais Lieber who was the first American to introduce an organized discussion of politics in his book Political Ethics, published in Lieber considered man as a multifarious animal, and believed that political science must include psychology, religions and the concepts of economy and social institutions (Lippincott, 1993:149). In 1857, Lieber was appointed as the first professor of political science at the University of Columbia. He was succeeded by his disciple John Burgess in 1880 (Mahoney, 1984:5). With Burgess, the story of the American political science begun because he pioneer who could lead those who followed him to the borders of a new discipline, though he himself did not cross these borders. He established the first department of international studies in the USA, and trained the first generation of scholars who founded the discipline of political science in the States. He urged his students to study local institutions which, to him, reflected the national character of the political system. Upon the exami-nation of those institutions, his students found nothing but corruption, presidential domination and inefficacy. The ideas of reform and studying actual practices and political processes emerged, and thus Burgess' students stood to his left (Mahoney, 1984:17-18). At the time when Burgess begun his teaching at Columbia, the Johns Hopkins University was established in 1876 as the first American institution of learning which was established as a university not as a college. It was in this University that the second group of political scientists, including Woodrow Wilson, was trained (Mahoney, 1984:12-13). Early in the 1890s, the School of Political Science was founded at the University of Columbia. It had three Departments: Economics and social sciences; History, Philosophy and Politics; and Public Law and Comparative legislatures. The latter soon became independent and focused on the political science. At Harvard, a College of Arts and Sciences was established in Among the twelve majors of this College was History and Political Science. In 1895, this major was split into two separate departments: History and Roman law, and Political Economy. In 1910, these two departments be-came History and Governments, and Political Economy. In 1911, the former became independent. Political sci-ence was accepted as an independent major at the University of California in 1903, at the University of Illinois in 1904, at the University of Wisconsin in 1904, at the University of Michigan in 1911, at the University of Minnesota in 1915, at the University of Stanford in In 1903, the American Political Science Association (APSA) was founded. In 1940, The APSA had a record of 40 (out of 531) universities and colleges having Political Science Departments. Meanwhile, 200 universities and colleges had courses on political science at the depart-ments of History, Economics, Ethics, Sociology and Philosophy (Ricci, 1984: 61-64). Thus, the first gene-ration succeeded in founding independent programs of political science while the second generation was able to establish an independent identity for the field, separate from other majors, and to pave the way for the third generation which was later to launch the Behaviorist Revolution. (Ricci, 1984:77) The case of Britain, France and Canada: The development of political science in these three countries shows how Britain was influenced by the French educational traditions, and how Canada was influenced by both. In France, political science, even though it emerged as a term before sociology, had no considerable academic community and the concept came to the fore only in the 1960s. So, the history of political science in France, we can say, is divided into two stages. In the first stage , the field had a weak professional identity for several reasons: a) It was a discipline of the elite who had various interests in the field and who used it as a material for argumentation on public issues; b) the field was controlled by formal, histo-rical and legal methods which emphasis overwhelmingly on the state; c) the main purpose was to enlighten the citizens by means of conversation; d) the field relied on politicians and civil servants as a source and a reference of political analysis. The second stage was from 1960 to 1989 when political science became a field of an independent identity and academic community. (Leca, 1991: ) In the 19 th century Britain, Socrates' tradition prevailed in that more emphasis was put on the critical questioning of the basic concepts and hypotheses than on the construction of an organized field of study. This was reflected in the educational structure that focused on the dialogue as an

5 Arif 481 intellectual training (Hayward, 1991:93). Then, the historical moment in the development of the British political science came when the London School of Economics and Political Science was founded in The first professor at this School, Graham Wallas, recorded that the founders of the School adopted the model of the Paris Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques. However, the London School was not as good as its equivalent in Paris at training the elite to serve the state. The second attempt was in the 1930s when the Nuffield College was established at Oxford University with the aim of bridging the gap between the theoretical and practical aspects of political practice. This expe-rience was no less than a failure due to the secretive nature of the British civil servants and their reluctance to discuss their practical issues. This obstacle held back the British political science from developing into an empirical science because of the inaccessibility to the basic information, and because of the segregation between those who knew but did not write and those who wrote but did not know. During World War II, political scientists began to join the government civil service. With the American influence, the behaviorist paradigm was adopted, and, later on, the first professional association of political science was founded in (Hayward, 1991: 94-96). The Canadian model, however, was a mixture of the two countries' experiences. The first chair of political science, called 'political economy', was established at the University of Toronto in 1888, and the University of Queen in Teaching political science followed the model of Oxford and Cambridge in Britain. Following the British tradition, the political science in Canada was understood as incorporating the studies of political economy, ethics, sociology, constitution and law and political history. The major influence came from such British scholars as Adam Smith, Ricardo and Mills. In the French-speaking Canada, however, political science was mainly influenced by neo- Thomism in social philosophy defended by the Roman Catholic Church, which controlled higher education. For this reason, the first independent program on contemporary social sciences in French was established in 1936 in Laval, and the first Department of political science in 1945 at the same university. (Trent and Stein, 1991: 61-62) The case of Germany: The academic analysis of political events has had a long history in German tradition. In the nineteenth century, this tradition began to deteriorate due to the domination of Formalism and Positivism over political science as a result of the state's tight control and the absence of a true civil society. Thus, political science was confined to legal and administrative dimensions, and the public law became synonymous with politics. In the 19 th century, there was a need to activate the masses' political awareness. This was due to the pressure of major social and political circumstances: a) Ideological war against trade unions and the Democratic Socialist Party; b) pragmatic reaction toward the newly emerging demands to train civil servants; c) chauvinist motives to secure the international role of the German state and to develop the internal resources; d) progressive efforts to gain more democracy. In 1920, in consequence of these variables, the German Academy of Politics was founded and became the main institution of political education. With the advent of the Third Reich, this academy was dissolved. In 1948, the academy was restored in West Berlin, and was incorporated into the Berlin Free University in The first chair of political science was established in In the 1960s, political science spread in all German universities as a major field. (Kastendiek, 1991: ) The epistemological structure of the political science at the stage of independence From the second half of the 19th century to 1920s was mainly a period of relativism, skepticism and the emergence of various, sometimes conflicting, perspectives, so much that the whole era became known as the 'Perspectivist era' (Doherty, Graham, and Malek,1992:6-9). This era witnessed the publishing of the works of the great pioneers who formed Western thought and social sciences in a later stage, like Karl Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Darwin, Max Weber and others. This stage was an introduction to the emergence of logical positivism in the early 20th century. The epistemological truisms of this trend - separation of fact and value, science and ethics, science and religion, material explanation of social phenomena, excessive interest in the empirical reality and the confinement of knowledge therein, and so on- were founded in the works of those pioneers. When the field of political science was first established, other social sciences had no independent entities. Rather, they were parts of humanities which were subjugated to the control of theological norms. The subjects of social sciences were thus dealt with in an ethical context within the framework of philosophy. According to the scientific traditions of the time, it was also hard to break away from the past. The works of Francais Lieber, the first political science professor in the USA, reflect the state of the field: a field just coming out of the womb of ethical phi-losophy. With the expansion of universities in the 1870s and 1880s, the five social sciences started to split, but did not become totally independent. Psychology and anthropology were linked to biology while political science was tied to history and legal studies. (Ross, 1993: 81, and Ricci, 1984: 59) Since the foundation of its first school, the Columbia s Graduate School of Political Science, the science of politics began to search for its own scope and method, especially under the influence of the School's founder, John Burgess who was graduated in Germany. Burgess sought to borrow the German tration, which is limited to the comparative historical method. This method was applied rather to public administration than to politics, to governments in their processes and functions than to constitutions, legal positions and documents. In cooperation with the German school graduate, Herbert Adams in Johns Hopkins, Burgess formed a new trend in political science that turned to a revolution at the hands of their students Frank Goodnow at Columbia and Woodrow

6 482 Afri. J. Pol. Sci. Int. Relat. Wilson at Johns Hopkins. These two scholars did not reject their professors' accomplishments but rather thought that they did not go all the way. Therefore, at the hands of these two scholars, political science focused on administration, process of progress, mea-surement of countries in accordance with the levels of progress, organization of the process of knowledge under the influence of pragmatism and the methodology of natural sciences. They also made efforts to find a real scientific method for the study of politics. Here, new attempts were made to get the political science closer to reality by studying the functions of government rather than being confined to its institutions. With the coming of Bentley s book the Process of Government in1908, the political science began to erect a quantitative base concentrating on figures and measures instead of external description (Mahoney, 1984: ). In his Introduction to his book Social Reform and the Constitution published in 1911, Goodnow, the founding chairman of the American Political Science Association, related the drastic transformation of political and social sciences to the rapid changes of communications and economy, which also led to seemingly unsolvable problems under the legal rules, seen as the basis of political science until late in the 19th century. To Goodnow, the American Political Science Association was established to foster this new discipline, the premises of which he, Wilson and their predecessors had laid (Mahoney, 1984:1). The new discipline, which was settled in the USA, relied on specific epistemological foundations that may be summarized as follows: (Ricci, 1984:70-74) a.) The liberal philosophy which was the hope of American society and its political ideology, and which was based on Thomas Jefferson's statement in the declaration of Independence of the USA: Men were given by their Creator basic rights that no one can take from them. This statement in turn is based on unquestionable theological bases of human rationality as a result of these rights offered by God. It, also based upon the idea of the vertical division of the society which means that society is formed of political groups, and these groups deal with each other on the basis of bargaining and mu-tual compromises. The government is responsible, and its responsibility is determined by the variety of groupsand of the representation of interests. b.) The general theory of the state derived from the German tradition and based on Hegel's philosophy. This concept of the state is different from its English equivalent, which means 'government' or 'homeland', and includes none of the German connotations which view it as an organic expression of the national identity by means of constitution, laws and conventions, so that there would be one state for each nation (Mahoney: 1984:25-45). c.) Pragmatism, in the American context, is more of a mental pattern than a system of ideas. Its influence on political science was behavioral in the psychological sense and positivist in the philosophical sense. Pragmatism has rejected all formalist and metaphysical attitudes, logic and ethical principles, confining objective know- ledge to the outer world which it views as independent from man's understanding. To pragmatism, the truth is a practical concept, not an absolute one. Pragmatists have adopted Darwin's evolution and believe that the universe is in constant transformation and uncertainty. They applied the evolutionary theory to human community, political life and even the truth. To William James, we should live today by the truth we find today, and should be ready to consider it falsehood tomorrow. The American political scientists have adopted pragmatism and applied it in their studies. Therefore, they dealt with knowledge as temporal, and the method as basic and of more priority, and followed James' statement that an opinion is either useful because it was true, or true because it was useful. Under the influence of pragma-tism, political science sought to describe the political phenomena away from any moral or metaphysical considerations. Pragmatism prevailed in the academic political milieus so much that almost all American political scientists recognize themselves as pragmatic. (Mahoney, 1984: 46-65) Pragmatism has also determined the purpose of political science: a discipline able to predict in order to control. Therefore, to pragmatists, control is the ultimate purpose of knowledge and the norm of its efficacy. (Mahoney, 1984:54) d.) Progressive movements prevailed in the American political scene. They focused on local political reform and private sector. Most political scientists joined these movements under the influence of two progressive thoughts: criticism of the US Constitution and separation of administration from politics. The main point in the progressive theory of political science was to enhance the executive power of the government so that it becomes only executive in the British sense of the word, and should not dominate the policy-making process, and to separate the executive apparatus from the civil service. (Mahoney, 1984:66-82) The ontological structure of political science in the stage of independence In order to examine the ontological component of the field of political science, we should recognize that the core of political science, at this stage, was the concept of the state. From the very beginning, political scientists defined it as the science of the state (farr, 1993: 64). The two concepts, science and state, kept arguing with each other from the last third of the 19th century to early 20th century. State was recognized as the subject of the discipline, while the discipline itself was recognized as the basis of the epistemological authority (Gunnell, 1993: 29). Therefore, knowledge and power, or science and the state intermingled to form a balanced model of the discipline and its subject. This relation, however, did not last long because, to the American society, the concept of the state was not an essential, political or prevalent one. There was even a 'sense of statelessness' in the American political thought and in the public culture prior to the 1870s due to the liberal tradition. The concept of

7 Arif 483 state became widely known after the materialization of the American state and the Bureaucratic Revolution that followed. It was imported from the German traditions (Farr, 1993:64-65). Therefore, by the 1920s, the concept of the state began to deteriorate as an essential element of political science. Charles Marriam and his disciples tried to find the identity of political science in its method rather than in its subject (Gunnell, 1993:29). Second, that period witnessed the separation of political science from the science of administration. In 1887 and for the first time in the history of political research, Wilson moved political dialogue from the question of who makes decisions to that of who enforces them. To him, it was not difficult to write a constitution, yet it was extremely hard to apply it, for there was a presumed difference between politics and administration. Then came Frank Goodnow who wrote Politics and Adminis-tration: A Study in Government, In this book, Goodnow recognized two basic functions of the state: the first is political that deals with the expression of the state's will in terms of policies, and the second is administrative that deals with the execution of these policies (Ricci, 1984: 85-86). Third, then came the distinction between formal and nonformal structures. In the late 19th century, Walter Begehot in Britain, and then Woodrow Wilson in the USA, concluded that beside the official structure of institutions and political offices, there are all kinds of non-official behavior and agencies, the latter has much more power to make decisions than the former. This development was a beginning of a new stage of the discipline in which a great deal of attention shifted away from the legal, official structures to non-official practices surrounding them (Easton, 1991:292). Finally, this stage witnessed the emergence of a number of political theories that were rather 'scientific' theories or laws. John Robert Seeley and Otto Hintze focused on the patterns the relationship between the external pressure and internal liberty in the evolution of the nation state in Western Europe. Moissaye Ostrogorski also presented his thesis on incongruity between the bureaucratic, populist political parties and democracy, which he had derived from a study on politi cal parties in both Britain and the USA. Roberto Michels also raised the 'iron law of oligarchy'. These contributions were extensions of older scientific traditions that approached the field of politics with methods closer to the concept of scientism that prevailed in the behaviorist stage, like the contributions of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, et al. (Almond, 1990:25) SECOND: THE STAGE OF TRANSFORMING INTO A BEHAVIORIST SCIENCE Paradigms do not emerge all of a sudden or as a result of an individual act or institutional decisions. A new paradigm is usually born from within an older one. Then, it stays latent next to the old one until it gains more supporters. Here, it keeps expanding to the detriment of the older one, until it replaces it. Later on, a newer para- paradigm comes out of it, and so on. The behaviorist paradigm has formed the second stage of the political science s evolution, that is, the stage of becoming a discipline in the logical positivist sense, seeking the adoption of the methodology of natural sciences in order to gain scientific legitimacy. It took half a century for this paradigm to develop into a dominant paradigm in the field of political science. During that period, it passed through three stages. First, it was philosophically emerged within logical positivist school early in the 20th century. Second, It gained an institutional framework by the establishment of the Social Sciences Research Council (SSRC). Third, it dominated the applied political research after the World War II. In all these stages, the behaviorist paradigm kept growing and expanding to the detriment of the approaches, methods and theories of the previous 'traditional' or 'transitional' stage. The early seeds of behaviorism may be detected in the following sources: the works of John Dewey and pragmatic school, especially their emphasis on the relation between philosophy and public affairs; the legal studies that started to examine the economic and social forces forming the law in the so called 'sociology of institution', sociology of legislation' and 'legal logic' under the influence of psychology; the works of Lambrozo who introduced the concept of measurement in law; the spread of social surveys, a method widely and extensively used by engineers, economists and sociologists in the early 20th century in the USA; and finally the works of the psychologists who used psychology as an approach to studying politics and sociology (Merriam,1993: ). The father of the Behaviorist Revolution, Charles Marriam, (Merriam,1993: ) summed up the evolution of the study of political science from the end of the 19th century to the 1920s in the following approaches: a.) comparing various patterns of political concepts, institutions and processes as means to analyze similarities and differences; b.) analyzing the economic forces and their relation to political processes with its economic explanation of the political phenomena; c.) analyzing the social forces and their relation to political processes, and take them as an approach for studying political phenomena; d.) analyzing the geographic environment and its impact on the political phenomena; e.) taking ethnic and biological facts into consideration, and their relation to the political forces, f.) These impacts as a whole have formed another relation between the political phenomena and the environment, social and natural, in general; g.) examining the genetic origins of political thoughts and in-stitutions, which is a double impact of history and biology on political research by means of emphasizing the significance of historical evolution and Darwinian theory; h.) incorporating the economic, social and mate-rial environmental impacts with the evolutionary or gene-tic vision, which later on led to a revolutionary change of political thinking; j.) using a more general model of quantitative measurement of the political phenomena. This took the form of statistics or mathematical analysis of the political processes. This factor was introduced via population census, which provided scholars with raw material; k.) the emergence of

8 484 Afri. J. Pol. Sci. Int. Relat. political psychology, which was the actual beginning of behaviorism. To Marriam, these ten points are the major variables that have formed political science up to his time, that is, the mid 1920s. To him, these approaches lack accessibility to information, classifying and analyzing them properly, and they are dominated by racist, ethnic and chauvinistic visions in their interpretation of the information available, and consequently they need highly efficient and accurate tools of measurement (Merriam, 1993:139). The institutional structure of political science at the behaviorist stage The first endeavor for APSA, according to its first chairman, Frank Goodnow, was to initiate an epistemological transition in the field. Under the chairmanship of Charles Marriam, APSA called for the founding of Social Sciences Research Council (SSRC). The call was joined by representatives of the American Economic Association, the American Sociological Association, and the American Statistical Association, in addition to some anthropologists, historians and psychologists (Sibley, 1974:139). In 1923, SSRC was established, and Marriam himself was the first chairman. This Council was viewed as a supra university agency authorized to coordinate among universities to pursue scientific research development. The Council played the focal role in formulating social sciences in the USA and then in the world as a whole in the second half of the twenties century. Most of the evolutionary efforts of these disciplines emerged from, and were linked to, this Council. The Council also directed scholars and political science departments to the study of people's actual behavior instead of analyzing institutions, constitutions and political thought. While in office, the Council's chairman, Charles Marriam, trained the first generation of contemporary political scientists (Ibid., 44). As chairman of Political Science Department at the University of Chicago, Marriam created a school of political scientists, including Harold Lasswell and a number of Ph. D. Students, David Truman, Herbert Simon, Gabriel Almond and others (Dahl, 1993:250). SSRC adopted the strategy of forming specialized committees to develop specific branches or fields, holding seminars and symposiums, and financing certain projects. Among the major committees SSRC formed are Committee on Political Behavior in 1945, Committee on Comparative Politics (1953), and Committee on Comparative Studies of Public Politics in 1972 (Sibley, 1974: 45-47). These committees came out with an orga-nized set of research projects that were basic references of the political science at that stage. By the end of the World War II, as a result of the nature of the political systems of the pre-war era, the war itself, and in cones-quence of the brain drain of political scientists to the USA, the infrastructure of political science collapsed in most European countries. Thus the European academic environment became totally dependent upon the American political science. So, as the Marshall Plan came to revive Europe's economy, the American beha-viorism came to reshape Europe's brain, especially in the field of political science. The American finance corporations swept the European continent with huge academic projects needed by the European academic life, especially in countries like Italy where the political science followed the American model by means of the cooperation programs, exchange of visiting professors, training programs, translation of the American academic works, and financing (Grasiano, 1991: ; Berndtson, 1991:41). The German political science was considerably influenced by its American equivalent, but the case was different from that of Italy. For instance, the behaviorist trend in the German political science was supported, but not directly oriented or controlled, by Ford Foundation (Kestendiek, 1991: 118). In Britain, in spite of the calls for overlooking behaviorism, the British political science partially and selectively started adopting the new 'fashion' in political research by focusing on the quantitative dimensions (Hayward, 1991: 97). The same thing happened in Scan-dinavian countries where behaviorism swept Sweden and Finland, especially in the 1950s and 1960s (Newton, 1991:234, and Anckar, 1991:192). The epistemological structure of political science at the behaviorist stage Epistemologically speaking, behaviorism is a manifesttation of logical positivism in social sciences. Logical positivist paradigm sought to elevate social sciences to the status of natural sciences in terms of methodological precision, experimentation, generalization, value neutrallity, and ability to predict phenomena. Psychology was the first discipline that embarrassed behaviorism in its primary, classical form. John Watson's article "Psychology as Seen by a Behaviorist" published in Since then, behaviorism started replacing the old paradigm in psychology and the principles of the behaviorist model such as objectivity, empiricism and controlled experiment became the methodological doctrines of all social science (Sen, 1990: 88-89). At the same time, Arthur Bentley was leading a silent revolution in political science with his book The Process of Government, 1908 (Lapalombara, 1988:24). Starting from World War I, the concept of political behavior began to be utilized by American political scientists. Nonetheless, the first to use this concept as title of a political book was not a political scientist, but a journalist named Frank Kent wrote The Political Behavior (Kent, 1928). To Kent, the study of political behavior meant cynical realism of the toughminded newspaperman who reports the way things really happen and not the way they re supposed to happen (Dahl, 1993: ). In 1925, Marriam described his conceptual revolution in political science as a change in the intellectual environment, which would eventually lead to a remarkable development in political research. Consequently the roles of religion, philosophy and theoretical politics were abandoned (Mahoney, 1984: 91) and replaced by other roles that could be summed up

9 Arif 485 in two major points (Ricci, 1984: ): first, The strong need to develop a scientific method of research; second, the revised meaning of science, based on the liberal discourse. Commitment to science means disregard to revelations or traditions -- a trend that has prevailed in American universities in the 19th century as a source of scientific knowledge. In his answer to the question why the behaviorist approach emerged and thrived in the USA, Robert Dahl presented a number of incentives tied together to form a realistic ground for this newly-emerging paradigm(dahl, 1993: ): a.) The thoughts of Charles Marriam attracted the attention of scholars to the fact that political science needed to take the same road as the other social sciences, opting for the study of real-life behavior; b.) The influence of the emigrants, especially the Germans, coming from Europe to the USA in the 1930s, with a social approach to politics essentially reflecting the influence of Max Weber. Those new comers were pushed to introduce their social approaches and behaviorism to political science. So, they introduced to the American political science the works of Marx, Durkheim, Freud, Pareto, Mosca, Max Weber, Michels and others; c.) World War II was an opportunity for the American political scientists to leave their ivory towers and get down to the socio-political reality of their times; d.) The rapid growth of using social surveys in American scholarship; e.) The impact of financing institutions, particularly endowments like Carnegie, Rockefeller and Ford foundations. These institutions have adopted a research agenda that focused on realistic issues. Therefore, grants were competitively offered to this kind of research projects. Meanwhile, the American philosophical environment was ready to make and develop such a change. Under the influence of William James and Dewey, the major current in the political science became behaviorist in the psychological sense and positivist in the philosophical sense. Thus, values were disregarded, while pragmatic vision domi-nated the political field (Gunnell, 1993: 35). The Refor-mist liberalism and pluralism played a similar role in supporting realistic attitudes at the expense of legal and philosophical trends (Seidelman, 1993: 311, and Gunnell, 1993:29). Behaviorism aimed at achieving the following goals (Von Beyme, 1991: 263; Ricci, 1984: ): a.) Stabilizing the primary duality of science and non-science by making a distinction between what is and what should be. Science is to focus on what is. What should be, however, is the focus of some other disciplines, but this does not mean that it is not important or unnecessary; b.) Focusing on the scientific method, particularly the procedural definitions related to reality, testable hypotheses, and the quantitative analysis; c.) Testability and refutability of scientific results reached; d.) The spread of empiricism and experimentalism in proving hypotheses, and in building and testing theories; e.) Reaching Thomas Kuhn's definition of science, or at least the stage of 'normal science', in Kuhn's terms; f.) Achieving the supreme goal of a social science, that is, social control, just as the supreme goal of the natural sciences is defined as control over nature. The ontological structure of the political science at the behaviorist stage The Behaviorist Revolution made a drastic change in the very definition of political science in terms of its analytic units, theory and concepts. In the beginning of the 20th century, the state was still the main subject of political science, but it was, in the western democracies, on its way to be de-sanctified, decentralized and becoming a ruling institution. As a result of the works of the pioneers like Wilson, the state had to be redefined as the government, just a tool of social reform, or just a means of any democratic formation by the majority. Thus, the organic theory of the state had to retreat in confrontation with another, newly-emerging vision shaped by the concept of pluralism (Gunnell, 1993:22). In his lecture at the University of Columbia on February 12, 1908, Charles Bird defined the concept of politics as starting with government, which, in the final analysis, is a definite number of people in the political community, charged with definite public responsibilities and duties (Beard, 1993:113). When World War I broke out, the British academic environment witnessed a wide rejection of the traditional theory of the state. The German political philosophy, particularly concepts like the worship of power in Neitzsche's works, came under critical scrutiny. This trend spread in the Anglo Saxon tradition under the influence of Harold Lasky who rejected both the concept of the 'Omnipotent State' as a source of laws and its ally concept of philosophical absolutism. Thus, there was a transition to pluralism, not as a description of a social fact, but as a theory of democratic society. These concepts were utilized in refuting the idealist philosophy, the theory of State Monism or sovereignty, and the legal formalist methodology (Gunnell, 1993:24). In the 1920s, it was hard, for American academics to make balance between the state as an alternative of the people and the US socio-political situation based on pluralism (Gunnell, 1993:23). Therefore, a serious conflict broke out in the field of political science between State Monism and the pluralism of societal forces, and consequently, between the legal structure of the state and the social processes of societal forces. However, Marriam did not intend to put an end to the conflict in favor of pluralism against the state. Rather, he considered pluralism acceptable as a social fact, not as a norm. The state was still the solution to the problem of plurality, the center of liberal democra-cy, and a means to solving social conflict (Gunnell, 1993:23-31). As a result of the transformation of the essence of science from the state to pluralism, the social groups and forces came into the focus of attention. The concepts of behavior and process became the secret code of the political science. The concept of the 'system' replaced the state. With the concepts of behavior, groups, processes and systems, behaviorism was able to revolutionize the language of political research. The study of political rights turned into the study of electoral behavior; the concepts of interests were incorporated into the concept of interest groups; amendment of law became known as the 'jurisprudential process', and all that is related to the state